Using the Canvas Migration tool

Important:

Oncourse is retired and will be fully decommissioned on September 1, 2017. Beginning in September, you will no longer be able to log in, and your data will not be recoverable, except gradebook data for grade disputes. To avoid data loss, download or migrate all data you wish to keep before August 31, 2017. For details, see About the Oncourse retirement.

The Canvas Migration tool was designed to copy course materials from Oncourse to Canvas. The tool is available in all Oncourse sites, and can copy content from the Oncourse Assignments, Resources, Forums, Gradebook, Tests & Surveys, Modules, and Lessons tools. See below for detailed instructions.

Note:

The Canvas Migration Tool will continue to be available until August 31, 2017. Oncourse data will no longer be available for migration after this date.

Important:

With the retirement of Oncourse, the Canvas Migration tool is no longer visible to instructors in the site menubar by default. To temporarily expose the tool, click Enable Migrations in the menubar and then refresh the page in your browser. Also, it is no longer possible to initiate a migration from within Canvas.

Before you begin

Before migrating content, UITS recommends reviewing your Oncourse sites and make notes about which ones you want to migrate, and which tools in each course have content you want to keep.

If you are uncertain about whether you'll need content for a course you no longer teach, migrate the course to Canvas. That way, if you teach the course again or want to share your materials with a colleague, you'll still have the content when Oncourse is no longer available.

When you migrate content from your Oncourse site(s) to Canvas, the original content is not deleted from your Oncourse site(s), so you can review it later if necessary.

Note:

New sites created using the Canvas Migration tool are not intended to be used for teaching your course. Instead, they are meant to serve as a workspace for reviewing and cleaning up your migrated content. Once you've edited the content to your satisfaction, you can import it into the Canvas site(s) provisioned for teaching the course.

Migrating course content

Note:

To use the migration tool, you need to have an administrative role (instructor, project owner, coordinator, or assistant) in the site. You can no longer add or change the roles of site members; if you need to have someone added to your site to assist with the migration, contact your departmental administrator for Oncourse, or email UITS Mission Critical.

Log into Oncourse and navigate to the site you wish to migrate.

From the menubar of the Oncourse site to be migrated, click Enable Migrations. Then refresh your browser page to temporarily expose the Canvas Migration tool in the menubar. (The Canvas Migration tool will be available for four hours; after that time, you'll have to click Enable Migrations again.)

From the menubar, click Canvas Migration.

Note:

The Canvas Migration tool does not run in Safari. Use a recent version of Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Firefox instead.

The first time you run the Canvas Migration tool, you'll be asked to authenticate to the tool. Click Authenticate, and then, in the resulting window, click Log in.

Select the tools you wish to migrate. You should see a form similar to this one:

Notes:

Sakai is the underlying code structure on which Oncourse is built; when you see reference to "Sakai" in the Migration tool, think of it as Oncourse.

The Assignments 2 checkbox refers to the tool known as "Assignments" in Oncourse.

In the "Canvas Course Name" field, enter a descriptive name for the new site in Canvas where your migrated content will be stored. The "Remote Course Name" field is automatically filled in with the name of the Oncourse site from which you are migrating content.

Click Submit. You should receive a confirmation message like this one:

Migration Request Status - Submitted Your Course Migration Request has been successfully submitted. The request is currently number : 1 in our processing queue. Login to Canvas to check the status of your migration.

If you see an error message or don't receive the confirmation message, reset the tool by clicking the reset button ( ) and try again. If you continue to have problems, seek help.

Important:

While the migration is in progress:

Do not move or remove content in the migrating course.

Do not log out of Oncourse.

Do not remove yourself from the instructor role in the migrating course.

In your personal navigation menu, click Content
Migrations. Under the heading "Latest Sakai Migration Requests", you'll see a list of your requests, displayed 10 at a time in reverse chronological order. If you have more than 10 requests, use the Next and Previous buttons to navigate among the pages.

Locate the course or courses you are interested in, and check the "Status" column to see whether the migration process has completed. The four possible migration statuses are:

Completed: Your Oncourse site content has been successfully converted to Canvas format, and Canvas will begin extracting the content in the designated Canvas course site.

Notes:

Depending on the amount of content, extraction can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Do not remove anything from the Oncourse site until you have confirmed that all the content was successfully migrated to Canvas.

In progress: Your Oncourse site content is in the process of being converted to Canvas format. Occasionally, the conversion process for a specific site stalls, and the site remains in progress indefinitely. If your site is in progress for more than one hour, initiate your request again. If the second request does not complete, seek help.

Waiting in queue: The conversion process has not yet started. Your site will be processed when the requests ahead of it have been completed.

Failed: Requests can fail for various reasons, such as data incompatibility or sites timing out. If your request fails, initiate it again. If it fails a second time, email the
migration-help-l mailing list. In your message, include the Remote Course ID (same as the Oncourse course ID) of the course that has the "Failed" status. UITS support staff will work with Instructure to troubleshoot the problem and suggest possible solutions.

Getting help with course migration

If one or more of your courses listed in the Migration tool has a "Failed" status, email the
migration-help-l mailing list. In your message, include the Remote Course ID (same as the Oncourse course ID) of the course(s) that have the "Failed" status. UITS support staff will work with you and Instructure to troubleshoot the problem and suggest possible solutions.